


439. centuries old

by piggy09



Series: The Sestre Daily Drabble Project [81]
Category: Orphan Black (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-19
Updated: 2016-09-19
Packaged: 2018-08-15 23:38:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 806
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8077918
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/piggy09/pseuds/piggy09
Summary: It's a bad place, Cold River. All concrete walls. No windows.





	

The door to Cold River creaks when Sarah opens it, a terrified shriek of a sound. Sarah won’t give Helena a gun, so all Helena has is the knife she pocketed when Sarah wasn’t looking. It’s not really enough to defend them, if there’s anything behind the door – but Helena is enough to defend Sarah, and that’s what matters.

“You know where we’re goin’?” Sarah asks, voice a quiet hiss. Helena nods one, sharp.

“Down,” she says. “They keep files in the basement. Your Swan Man, what they know of him, it will be down there.”

“Don’t know why we couldn’t just go to where that photo was,” Sarah mutters. Helena doesn’t answer; she just follows Sarah inside.

Here is the answer: if Sarah found Swan Man, she would leave Helena behind. Helena wants her to find him, for _sestra_ -brother-Felix’s sake – which is to say, for Sarah’s sake – but not yet. Not now. Helena hasn’t gotten Sarah to sing along to the radio yet. She still needs – she still needs time. That’s all.

“People move,” Helena says vaguely. “Animals find new drinking holes. You aren’t Maggie, Sarah. You couldn’t find him again, if he ran away.”

For a moment the only sound is their footsteps in the echoing hallways of Cold River. It’s a bad place here. All concrete walls, no windows. Sarah’s flashlight darts nervously over the walls; it looks about as nervous as Helena feels. Helena can feel the screams in the walls, all the people, all the babies who screamed and screamed and died.

“Maggie take you with her?” Sarah asks. Helena’s shoulders drop at the sound of her sister’s voice in the dark – just the sound of it, that alone enough to comfort.

“No,” she says. “She found the – she found them. I followed.”

“Maggie threw up when she saw blood,” she continues quietly. “It made her sick. She hated it. So.”

“So that’s what you were for.”

“Yes.”

They come to a fork in the hallway. Helena can feel that Sarah is about to say that they split up – of course she is. Of course she is! That is Sarah, right there, all in those few bitty words. _Let’s split up._

Helena licks a finger, holds it up, feels the faint breeze wafting from the left. “Right,” she says, following the beating of her heart.

“You sure?” Sarah says.

“Yes.”

Sarah nods curtly and heads right. Helena follows, hands in her pockets, one hand around the knife.

“Sarah?” she says.

“Yeah?”

“Once brother- _sestra_ -Felix is out of prison. I can still kill Rachel. If you want me to.”

Sarah lets out a little laugh-breath. “Yeah,” she says, “might take you up on that one.” Helena’s heart kicks once, an excited drum. For a second she holds the dizzy image in her belly and in her throat: Helena standing over Rachel’s body with the bloody knife and Sarah taking it out of her hands and cleaning off her bloody fingers with a cold washcloth and thanking her over and over and over. Then she blinks, and the image is gone. She knows it wouldn’t be like that anyways. But it makes her veins spark.

_I’d do anything for you_ , she thinks. _Anything, anything_. But she shouldn’t say that; she knows that too. She holds the words under her tongue and does not say them.

They find the staircase heading down. Sarah leads them. Helena follows. Her brain whispers a giddy stream of people coming behind them, and Helena, and Helena’s knife. She already let herself have Rachel so she shouldn’t let herself have this too, but the thought of it – Sarah whispering _you saved my life_ again – her hand on Helena’s hand—

Helena is too busy thinking about it, and she trips on the edge of one of the metal stairs. Stupid Helena! Clumsy Helena! She was never this clumsy before, before she knew what loving people felt like. Now she is all stumbles. She manages to catch herself with her hand on Sarah’s shoulder, except: Sarah gasps, except: Sarah turns around, except: the gun, Sarah’s gun, Sarah’s gun pointed at Helena’s heart.

The right way this time. The right side.

Helena throws her hands up. She’s blinded by the beam of Sarah’s flashlight pointed at he, can’t see anything. Can’t see Sarah, which seems very unfair: if she’s going to die, she wants to at least see Sarah one more time before she goes.

But instead Sarah hisses “ _shit_ ” and “don’t – don’t do that” and turns back around. She keeps heading down the stairs. Helena keeps her hands held up until her heart stops ramming itself against her ribs, over and over, urgent with the need to keep on beating.

When it calms down, she puts her hands in her pockets. She keeps following Sarah down into the dark.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! Please kudos + comment if you enjoyed! :)


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